Tuesday 10th September at 4pm we were treated to a 9 minute video of PlayStation genius designer Mark Cerny talking about the new PS5 Pro. And for the first time in my adult life, I didn’t understand. Have I reached that age where technology outpaces my feeble mind? I’ve been thinking that whenever I look at the new Call of Duty, so maybe this is confirmation.

In reality, I’m aware it’s not the case. I understood the things Mark Cerny was saying, and could see that it gives players marginally better performance and smoother, better quality graphics. But it’s a series of marginal gains that don’t add up to the half step Sony delivered with the PS4 Pro. Watching it, I settled on this being for people who have used their PS5 to breaking point, so are in need of new hardware, and this would be the sensible choice. 

Then the price was revealed as £699, and all that became irrelevant. These new consoles in the past have come out with a reduction in cost for the older model, but that’s no more. The existing PS5 is staying at the same price, or even going up in some territories. It leaves Sony with a new product on sale that offers nothing groundbreaking at an extreme price point that turns away any casual fans, and most of the hardcore too. 

Sony can make a weak point towards the cost of other tech goods. The latest iPhone and Google Pixel both hit the £1,000 mark, and the televisions you need to get the most out of these games are well over that same figure, often multiples of it. The reason you won’t see Sony wheel this excuse out there is that the Playstation is an additive to a TV. It’s useless without one. And mobile phones are an entirely different market all together with a programmed market and regular demand to innovate. 

It will be fascinating to see the numbers this console does. The previous gen this step was a requirement, but the fact is there are currently only a handful of games that require a base PS5 to run. Most of the games in the last few years all run on Playstation 4. Initially it seems like perhaps the developers just aren’t pushing enough out of the Playstation 5 yet, but what if the truth is there isn’t much more to give. 

On release, the Xbox Series X was touted as being far more powerful than the PS5. It was a fact that had no impact on their sales figures, but still notable. Xbox has its own issues with their consoles. Splitting their user base into two camps with different levels of power using the Series S has meant that developers cannot always push their games to the level they may want as Xbox has made it a requirement for all games to run on both skews of their consoles. 

When these consoles were announced, the Solid State Drive storage was the big new thing. The SSD’s speed has been a revelation, games now load so much faster than they ever did before. The rest of the console was pretty much a small bump in performance to the PS4 Pro. Could it be that this generational half step is going to lead to the end of the traditional console cycle? 

If we look at phones, they’re now on a yearly tech cycle, but the difference is minimal between any two consecutive phones. At Apple’s event this week the new iPhone 16 pro was revealed. I currently use an iPhone 14 pro, and honestly it’s the exact same thing but this one has a chip more suited to handle some AI processes. 

It leads me to believe the future of these consoles will be more akin to other tech platforms, and the defined lines between generations will be almost entirely erased. With only a fraction of games requiring the latest hardware to play, we may be closer than we realise. The next few events in the gaming space will be interesting to watch with this in mind. Does Xbox bother with a half step console, or undercut Playstation and go for their bigger hardware jump early? When we eventually see it, what is the next hardware jump about? 

Incremental upgrades will lead to a cycle where consumers only buy a new console when they feel there is a suitably beneficial jump. It leads to a splintered market in the tech industry where there are the consumers who upgrade every year, and consumers who upgrade when their device is no longer useful. There are of course a bunch of people in the middle ground, like myself, who upgrade their phone at the end of contracts, and tend to get the latest big tech products like TV’s when they become financially sensible. I have an OLED TV, but I didn’t pay huge figures like some early adopters did.

That range of consumers lends itself to more regular releases of product, so you always have a new thing on shelves for someone to get. If your PS4 Pro is only just starting to struggle, picking up a PS5 that’s been on shelves for years isn’t as satisfying as that shiny new PS5 Pro. The games themselves have already reached the point where they can be played on a sliding skew of systems, so it’s not really an adjustment for developers.

The issue with this current PS5 Pro is clearly price. It bumps the playstation into the realms of iPhones and Laptops. It’s not necessarily a direction I want gaming to go in, but its one that I think it’s too late to avoid now. The PS5 Pro might just be the canary in the coal mine for the end of console generations as we know it.